Now Marks, who runs a group called Citizen Center that has involved itself in multiple election issue lawsuits, has thrown a huge wrench into the Sept. 10 recall elections against Sens. John Morse of Colorado Springs and Angela Giron of Pueblo. Or more precisely, she handed the wrench to the Libertarian Party and told them where to throw it.

But we hope this means he won’t be making any more runs for president or other federal offices, either.

Perry, who will have served three terms as governor of Texas, started out as a Democratic lawmaker in the Texas legislature in 1984 but became a Republican, cutting a profile as an arch-conservative who came off as anti-gay and not exactly pro-environment. He also shocked his fellow Americans by flirting with the notion of Texas seceding from the union.

But Perry may be best known for his longhorn-in-the-headlights moment in 2011 when, as a contender for the GOP presidential nomination, he had a famous “oops” moment during a debate when trying to remember the names of the three federal departments he would have eliminated as president and couldn’t recall the third. You know you’ve crossed the Rio Dumbo when comedians joke that George W. Bush was “the smart Texas governor.”

An independent poll released Thursday shows Gov. John Hickenlooper is heading for a tough reelection fight in 2014 and has been hurt by the call he made when deciding whether to spare the life of convicted killer Nathan Dunlap.

Pollster Floyd Ciruli shared with us his thoughts with us about the Quinnipiac survey. Ciruli believes Hick is in trouble for 2014. The governor, he said, was not persuasive in how he explained his decision to extend a temporary reprieve from the death penalty to Dunlap. The so-called Chuck E. Cheese killer was sentenced to die for killing four people in 1993.

Some 67 percent of those surveyed disapproved of the governor’s decision in the case. When asked about their preferences in the 2014 governor’s race, there was strong support for Hickenlooper’s potential GOP opponents. In head-to-head matchups with Secretary of State Scott Gessler, state Sen. Greg Brophy and former U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo, the challengers are competitive.

Hick against Tancredo is 42-41. Hick against Gessler is 42-40. Hick against Brophy is 43-37. The poll’s margin of error is plus or minus 3 percentage points. Read more…

House Bill 1303, which is still being considered by legislators as part of an election reform package, makes vote fraud easy in Colorado. This past fall, a liberal voter registration drive called “Work for Progress” tried to get three ballots for one man. Because there were 29 days between the registration deadline and the election, my staff exposed this vote fraud attempt and stopped him from voting three times. To ensure that fraud can’t be stopped, Democrats introduced a late bill that strips clerks of the ability to review these registrations and mandates that they provide ballots immediately on Election Day, even to those with no photo ID or no other verifiable way to ensure their identity.

If you, like me, love America’s sacred tradition of honest, fair, and transparent elections you should be scared. I believe that if you knew what this legislation would really do, you would help me fight it. While my concerns with House Bill 13-1303 are legion, I feel compelled to focus on a few or the worst offenders.

By recklessly embracing same day voter registration, the proponents of this bill rely on a state system that today only catches fraud by giving election staff the opportunity to verify each new registration. Read more…

It’s officially the new normal: For the third presidential election in a row, young voters turned out at historically high rates to cast their ballots. Here in Colorado, young voter turnout exceeded the national average and exit polls showed the youth vote share of the total electorate was 20 percent, up from 14 percent in 2008.

Hopefully those pundits who are more comfortable writing headlines about Millennials’ alleged apathy have spent the last few months reevaluating the power these newcomers can have in politics.

That the most encouraging of trends in civic participation has become the new normal is welcome news at a time when our democracy could use a boost. Our state and country have a complex series of challenges to tackle, so we need the strongest democracy we can muster — meaning, we need everyone to be a part of the solution. But a series of barriers stand in the way, keeping eligible voters who want to participate in their own governance from having a say. Confusing rules, arbitrary deadlines, errors, and long lines keep eligible voters on the sidelines, preventing us from putting our best foot forward as a state and nation. Read more…

President Barack Obama delivers his inauguration address at the U.S. Capitol on Monday. (Justin Sullivan, Getty Images)

What some of the nation’s columnists are saying about President Obama’s second inaugural address Monday:

[It was] less an inaugural address for the ages than a leftover campaign speech combined with an early draft of the State of the Union address. Obama used the most visible platform any president has to decry global-warming skeptics who “still deny the overwhelming judgment of science.” He quarreled with Republicans who say entitlement programs “make us a nation of takers.” He condemned the foreign policy of his predecessor by saying that “enduring security and lasting peace do not require perpetual war.” “We cannot mistake absolutism for principle or substitute spectacle for politics, or treat name-calling as reasoned debate,” the president informed his opponents. Not that they were listening.— Dana Milbank, The Washington Post Writers Group

In 19 minutes, Obama delivered an eloquent, powerful and often combative summary of his values as a progressive Democrat who believes that an activist federal government helps make America great. And if there was any question about how ambitious an agenda Obama intends to pursue in his second term, the answer was clear: He’s going big, not small, just as he did in 2009.— Doyle McManus, Los Angeles Times

Obama … came across as a prudent, nonpopulist progressive. But I’m not sure he rescrambled the debate. We still have one party that talks the language of government and one that talks the language of the market. We have no party that is comfortable with civil society, no party that understands the ways government and the market can both crush and nurture community, no party with new ideas about how these things might blend together.
But at least the debate is started. Maybe that new wind will come.— David Brooks, The New York Times

Someone — a member of the Judson Welliver Society of presidential speechwriters perhaps — should produce a parlor game called “Write your own Inaugural Speech.” By shuffling a series of oratorical flourishes, the player would be able to craft a suitable Inaugural for a president of any party or ideological tendency. It would be lofty, vague, uplifting, and falsely bold. It would point to anonymous challenges, promise to climb distant hills, and scorn the foolish temptation to follow an easier path to the same results. It would defend freedom, equality, compassion, love, prudence, risk-taking, faith, hope, and charity against their ruthless and determined detractors.— John O’Sullivan, National Review OnlineRead more…

After a long, grueling presidential campaign, we were in the mood for a little levity.

And that’s what we got when we saw a White House photo of U.S. Olympic gymnast McKayla Maroney joined by President Barack Obama in displaying Maroney’s “not impressed” look.

Maroney’s dissatisfied scowl became an Internet meme after the London 2012 Olympics in which she won a silver medal in the individual vault competition. She had been favored to win a gold. Her unhappy mug gained traction on the Internet and was superimposed on images from history, pop culture and current events.

When the U.S. gymnastics team recently visited the White House, the president brought up “the face.”

“We were about to leave and he said, `I want to talk to you one second about the face,'” Maroney told The Assoicated Press. “He said, `I pretty much do that face at least once a day.'”

And thus, a new meme was born. And an amusing moment was injected into a world of serious problems.

Human nature and politics being what they are, Republicans will underestimate the trouble they’re in, and Democrats will be eager to overestimate the strength of their post-2012 position.

Begin with the GOP: As Republicans dig out from a defeat that their poll-deniers said was impossible, they need to acknowledge many large failures.

Their attempts to demonize President Obama and undercut him by obstructing his agenda didn’t work. Their assumption that the conservative side would vote in larger numbers than Democrats was wrong. The tea party was less the wave of the future than a remnant of the past. Blocking immigration reform and standing by silently while nativist voices offered nasty thoughts about newcomers were bad ideas. Latino voters heard it all and drew the sensible electoral conclusion. Read more…

There are some people who are angry, really angry, about the outcome of the 2012 presidential election. We get that.

But secession? News that people from 30 states have signed on to secession petitions via the “We the People” page on the White House web site is harsh, yet ironically, an example of the freedoms we enjoy as citizens of this nation.

If these folks are hoping to get President Obama’s attention, well, mission accomplished. But truly, it’s not news that the election was partisan and bitterly so at times.

That several hundred thousand people in a nation of 313 million were angry enough to sign a petition that anyone can see online is a reflection of our digital connectivity and our freedom. In other parts of the world, that sort of dissent would earn you a trip to the gulag.

After last Tuesday’s election swept President Obama into a second term in the White House, many prominent Republicans are calling for their party to change course on immigration policy in light of the GOP’s disastrous showing among Hispanics. Considering President Obama’s 87 percent support in Colorado last week, I agree, a change of heart would be prudent.

Prominent GOP national figures have publicly called for comprehensive immigration reform, while closer to home, former Colorado Senate Minority Leader Josh Penry and former Rep. Rob Witwer have called for further outreach. These actions should help us solve longstanding problems with our immigration system and the fallout that hits far too many of our friends, neighbors, and loved ones.

These Republican challenges to past orthodoxy are the right thing to do, even as they may strengthen the Republican Party at the expense of my own Democratic Party. But confronting Republican extremism on immigration alone won’t go far enough, especially in light of harsh and insensitive rhetoric that attacked far too many of our friends and neighbors. Read more…

Vincent Carroll is The Denver Post's editorial page editor. He has been writing commentary on politics and public policy in Colorado since 1982 and was originally with the Rocky Mountain News, where he was also editor of the editorial pages until that newspaper gave up the ghost in 2009.

Guidelines: The Post welcomes letters up to 150 words on topics of general interest. Letters must include full name, home address, day and evening phone numbers, and may be edited for length, grammar and accuracy.

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